North Korea. East Timor. Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave that for decades has been a powder keg for ethnic conflicts between Armenians and Azeris.
These they are not the typical tourist destinations where everyone goes.
But don’t tell Erik Faarlund, editor of a Norwegian photography website, who has visited all three.
Her next “dream” trip is to visit San Fernando, Philippines around Easter, when people volunteer to be one. nailed to a cross to commemorate the suffering of Jesus Christ, a practice that the Catholic Church has long sought speak.
Faarlund, whose wife prefers to sunbathe on the beaches of the Mediterranean, often says so I travel alone.
“My wife wonders why the hell I want to go to these places and I was wondering why the hell she goes to the places she goes to,” he said.
Faarlund, 52, has visited places that fall into a travel category known as thanatotourism or dark tourisma term that basically means visiting places linked to death, tragedy and the macabre.
With travel resuming, most people use their vacation time for typical purposes:
escape from reality, relax and recharge.
This is not the case with Thanatotourists, who use their holidays to immerse themselves in the desolate and even violent corners of the world.
Dark tourists claim that going to abandoned nuclear power plants or to countries where genocides have occurred is one way to do it understand the harsh realities current political crises, climatic calamities, war and the growing threat of authoritarianism.
“When the whole world is on fire and flooded and no one can afford the electricity bills, lying on a beach at a five-star resort is embarrassing,” said Jodie Joyce, who manages contracts for a genome sequencing company. in England and visited Chernobyl and North Korea.
Faarlund, who does not see his travels as a thanatotourism, said he wants to visit places “that work in a completely different way from how things work at home.”
No matter what their motives are, Faarlund and Joyce are by no means the only ones.
According to a study released in September by Passport-photo.online, which surveyed more than 900 people, 82% of American travelers said they had visited at least one dark tourist destination in their life.
More than half of the respondents said they preferred to visit “active” or previously active war zones.
About 30 percent said that once the war in Ukraine was over, they wanted to visit the steel plant in Ukraine. Azovstalwhere Ukrainian soldiers resisted Russian forces for months.
The growing popularity of thanatotourism suggests that more and more people are reluctant to take the holidays they promise evasionchoosing instead to witness firsthand places of suffering they have only read about, said Gareth Johnson, one of the founders of Young Pioneer Tours, who organized trips to Joyce and Faarlund for him.
According to Johnson, tourists are tired of “seeing in.” sanitized version of the world”.
A pastime that dates back to the times of the gladiators.
The term “dark tourism” was coined in 1996 by two Scottish academics, J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, who wrote “Dark Tourism: The Call of Death and Disaster”.
However, according to Craig Wight, an associate professor of tourism management at Napier University in Edinburgh, people have been using their spare time to witness the horror for years. hundreds of years.
“It goes back to the gladiator battles” of ancient Rome, he said.
“People went to see public hangings. There were tourists sitting comfortably in carriages watching the battle of Waterloo. “
Wight says that the modern dark tourist often goes to a place defined by tragedy to establish a connection with the place, a feeling that is difficult to achieve just by reading it.
According to this definition, anyone can be a Thanatotourist.
A tourist who spends a weekend in New York City might visit the Zone zero.
Visitors to Boston could drive north SalemMassachusetts, to learn more about the persecution of people accused of witchcraft in the 17th century.
travelers a Germany or Poland They could visit a concentration camp. They could have any number of motives, from honoring the victims of genocide to wanting a better understanding of history.
But, in general, an obscure tourist is someone who has a habit of looking for tragic, morbid or even dangerous places, whether the destinations are local or as far away as Chernobyl.
In recent years, tour operators have sprung up all over the world promising deep dives in places known for recent tragedies, media attention has followed the trend and questions visitors’ intentions with it, said Dorina-Maria Buda, professor of tourism studies at Nottingham Trent University.
The stories of people who are left speechless in the districts destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans or posing for selfies a Dachau they aroused disgust and indignation.
“What prompted these people to visit these places was a sense of voyeurism or an intention to share the pain and show support?” asked the Buddha.
‘Ethically dark territory’
David Farrier, a New Zealand journalist, spent a year documenting trips to places like Aokigahara (the so-called “Suicide Forest“In Japan), the luxury prison that Pablo Escobar built for himself in Colombia and McKamey Manor in Tennessee, a popular “haunted house” tour where people sign up to be beaten, buried alive, and submerged in cold water until they feel they are about to drown.
The trip became a show called “Dark Tourist” (“The other tourism”), which premiered Netflix in 2018 and was derided by some critics as macabre and “sleazy”.
Farrier, 39, said he often questioned the moral implications of his travels.
“Ethically it’s very dark territory,” Farrier said.
But Farrier felt it was worth “turning on the cameras” in places and rituals that most people want to know, but will never experience.
Visiting places where terrible events occurred was humbling and helped him cope with his fear of death.
Farrier said he felt privileged to have visited most of the places he saw, with the exception of McKamey Manor.
“It was crazy,” Farrier said.
An opportunity to reflect
Part of thanatotourism’s appeal is its ability to help people process what’s going on “as the world gets darker and darker,” said Jeffrey S. Podoshen, a marketing professor at Franklin and Marshall College who specializes in dark tourism.
“People are trying to understand the dark things, things like the reality of death, death and violence,” he said.
“They see this type of tourism as a way to prepare”.
Faarlund recalled a trip he took with his wife and twin children:
a private tour of Cambodia which included a visit to the Killing Fields, where between 1975 and 1979 more than 2 million Cambodians were killed or died of starvation and disease under the regime of the Khmer Rouge.
His sons, who were 14 at the time, listened intently to the brutal and merciless stories of the Khmer Rouge-run torture center.
At one point, the boys had to go out to get some air.
There they remained silent for a long time.
“They needed a break,” Faarlund said.
“It was mature enough of him.”
Later, they met two of the survivors of the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge, frail men between the ages of 80 and 90.
The teens asked if they could hug them, and the men agreed, Faarlund said.
It was a heartwarming trip that also included visits to temples, including Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, as well as frog, oyster, and squid meals at a roadside restaurant.
“They loved him,” Faarlund said of his family.
However, he cannot imagine that they accompany him to see people re-enact the crucifixion in the Philippines.
“I doubt they want to follow me on this,” Faarlund said.
c.2022 The New York Times Company
Source: Clarin
